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Josephine Tey Quotes
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All his life Toselli's smile had been stretched across his rage, like a tight-rope spanning a chasm.
Josephine Tey
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He knew by heart every last minute crack on its surface. He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them; rivers, islands, and continents. He had made guessing games of it and discovered hidden objects; faces, birds, and fishes. He made mathematical calculations of it and rediscovered his childhood; theorems, angles, and triangles. There was practically nothing else he could do but look at it. He hated the sight of it.
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Letterwriting is the natural outlet of the "odds." The busy-bodies, the idle, the perverted, the cranks, the feel-it-my-duties... Also the plain depraved. They all write letters. It's their safe outlet, you see. They can be as interfering, as long-winded, as obscene, as pompous, as one-idea'd, as they like on paper, and no one can kick them for it. So they write. My God, how they write!
Josephine Tey
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You can't have a tin can tied to your tail and go through life pretending it isn't there.
Josephine Tey
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That was the way with grief: it left you alone for months together until you thought that you were cured, and then without warning it blotted out the sunlight.
Josephine Tey
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Riches... don't consist in having things, but in not having to do something you don't want to do.... Riches is being able to thumb your nose.
Josephine Tey
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As a psychologist she began to suspect she was a very good teacher of French.
Josephine Tey
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'Grumbling' was a highly inadequate word to describe the blazing opposition that lighted Pat like a torch. He throbbed with it, like a car at rest with the engine running.
Josephine Tey
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There were people whose only interest in life was writing letters. To the newspapers, to authors, to strangers, to City Councils, to the police. It did not much matter to whom; the satisfaction of writing seemed to be all.
Josephine Tey
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Nothing puts things in perspective as quickly as a mountain.
Josephine Tey
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Her talent lay exclusively in seeing that other people employed theirs.
Josephine Tey
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Nothing in this world came out of satisfaction. Except the human race.
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After three days without one, the desire to read a newspaper vanished. And really, one was happier without.
Josephine Tey
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One would expect boredom to be a great yawning emotion, but it isn't, of course. It's a small niggling thing.
Josephine Tey
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Charles loathed horses; which he held to be animals of an invincible stupidity, uncontrolled imagination, and faulty deduction.
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Lucy decided to forget her weight just this once and enjoy herself. This was a decision she made with deplorable frequency.
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It was pleasant to talk shop again; to use that elliptical, allusive speech that one uses only with another of one's trade.
Josephine Tey
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The beasts that talk,
The streams that stand,
The stones that walk,
The singing sand,
That guard the way
To Paradise.
Josephine Tey
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Fasting was good for the imagination but bad for logic.
Josephine Tey
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In hospitals there was no time off for good behavior.
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Horse sense is the instinct that keeps horses from betting on men.
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The truth of anything at all doesn't lie in someone's account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper, the sale of a house, the price of a ring.
Josephine Tey
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When a man had been a counsel in the criminal courts as long as Kevin had, his mind had only points of view, not convictions any more.
Josephine Tey
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I expect this is what death is like when you meet it. Sort of wildly unfair but inevitable.
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Lack of education is an extraordinary handicap when one is being offensive.
Josephine Tey
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Quote of the day
Joy is like restless day; but peace divine Like quiet night; Lead me, O Lord, — till perfect Day shall shine Through Peace to Light.
Adelaide Anne Procter
Josephine Tey
Born:
July 25, 1896
Died:
February 13, 1952
(aged 55)
Bio:
Josephine Tey was a pseudonym used by Elizabeth MacKintosh, a Scottish author best known for her mystery novels. She also wrote as Gordon Daviot, under which name she wrote plays, many with biblical or historical themes.
Known for:
The Daughter of Time (1951)
Brat Farrar (1949)
The Franchise Affair (1948)
The man in the queue (1929)
The singing sands (1952)
Most used words:
time
people
life
Josephine Tey on Wikipedia
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